School Board could learn from teacher who helped gay students

February 22, 2013|Lauren Ritchie, COMMENTARY

The School Board spent nearly two hours this week hearing passionate comments from those who want students to be allowed to form a gay-straight alliance at Carver Middle School in Leesburg and equally passionate comments from those who don't.

In the end, one board member declared she wanted to ensure the safety of students. Beside the point. Who doesn't? Another said clubs are good, but she didn't think there's any significant bullying in schools. Wrong planet. Two more said they were "concerned" about young students talking about sex. As if that's not the No. 1 topic already. The fifth board member was absent.

All in all, board members did a magnificent job of weaseling out of saying anything significant, meaningful or even on point.

So, thank heavens for teachers like Randa "Sissie" Zollinger.

She spent 43 years in the classroom, talking to teenagers just learning about their sexual identities. If Zollinger and other teachers like her had been as squeamish in discussing sexuality as the wimps on the School Board, plenty of students would be emotionally worse for it.

Zollinger, 67, retired from Tavares High School, where she taught physical education. She now substitutes there.

Perhaps the School Board could learn a thing or two about the realities of the classroom by reading Zollinger's new fiction book, "Shadow of the Rainbow." It is due to be available late next week as a print edition or ebook at amazon.com.

"It's based on all of the kids that I've taught, but not on any single one," Zollinger said. "It's based on all the things I saw during my years of teaching. Kids would come to me and talk."

Why her?

"They may have felt I was a similar soul, and I am a similar soul," she said. "I love kids, and I think they know it."

And what they told the longtime teacher were stories of pain. That's what the book explores.

Zollinger said she never expected or planned to write a book, but in the spring of 2011 she decided she had something to say.

The book opens in a hospital with a teenager who has tried to take his own life because he is gay. Then, it skips back in time to when the boy began having sexual-identity issues in elementary school.

Among the characters are a kindly lady who lives across the street and a brother and father who don't accept the boy's sexual orientation. The tension ratchets up when the father won't let the teenager see his boyfriend and a favorite teacher is diagnosed with cancer. Then, the book begins to look at what happened to the father as a young boy.

Kids who are just figuring out that they are attracted to the same sex fear two things most, Zollinger said: being rejected by their parents if they share the newfound discovery and being looked down on by their peers.

There has been lots of change in how gay teens are viewed since Zollinger started teaching — kids today often don't care about sexual orientation — but the anxiety still weighs on the student making the revelation.

"Sometimes, you really don't know exactly what other people will think, so you don't want to take that chance," she said.

Others, she said, are open and struggling with how they're treated. Take, for example, a young man in the early 1990s at Tavares High who always dressed like the girls did and was on the path to changing his gender.

The teen refused to change clothes for gym in the boys' locker room because he just wasn't going to take the inevitable teasing about his sexual identity or the way he dressed. The school, of course, wasn't about to let him change with the girls.

Zollinger came up with a simple solution. She took the boy to a classroom with a little private back room where he changed into the required uniform and took gym like everyone else.

"It worked out fine. All kids are not the same as far as how they feel and what they need" but the school should try to help them, she said.

And over the years, Zollinger said, she's heard the same thing from student after student:

"Being gay is not about sex. It's about who a person is able to make an attachment with. It's an emotional attachment far more than the physical part."

And School Board members who think middle-school students aren't considering their sexual orientation?

"Apparently, these people have never been in a middle school," Zollinger said.

Thanks to Zollinger, students going through Tavares High for more than four decades had a sympathetic ear combined with the measured wisdom of an adult who cares for their well being. And that's what these gay-straight alliances are all about.

Time for the School Board to do some research and learn more about sexual orientation — and then man up and help these "different" kids get through school in the best way possible.

Lritchie@tribune.com. Her blog is online at http://www.orlandosentinel.com/laurenonlake. Lauren invites you to join her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/laurenonlake.